In this interview, conducted by guest blogger Alex Walker, the founder of Free Student Press, David Krane, explains that student free speech is legally protected by the first amendment, but students must fight for that protection. School officials typically do everything they can to prevent students from knowing about and exercising their constitutional rights.

In the absence of an appropriate intellectual foundation and motivation to learn, students acquire academic skills by rote, in shallow, meaningless ways. This not only wastes students' time, but can cause serious harm to their future intellectual and academic development. Here's some of the evidence.

Many preschool and kindergarten teachers are extremely upset by the increased pressure to teach literary and numerical skills to little children and test them regularly. They can see firsthand the unhappiness generated, and they suspect that the children would be learning much more useful lessons by playing. Their suspicions are well validated by research studies.

Danielle and Alexander Meitiv have been giving their children some of the same freedom that they themselves enjoyed as children, in a world that is safer than the one in which they grew up. As a consequence, they have been visited by police, and the county Child Protective Services have threatened to take their children away. Here is my interview with Danielle.

Adam Eichenbaum, Daphne Bavelier, and C. Shawn Green have, in a recent review article, summarized a growing mountain of evidence for long-lasting positive effects of video-game play on basic mental processes--such as perception, attention, memory, and decision-making--regarded by some as the building blocks of intelligence.

The Bedley brothers (Tim and Scott), who are both teachers in California, have started a movement, and it seems to be taking off. They have declared Feb. 4, 2015, to be the first annual Global School Play Day. Let's do everything we can to support it!

On January 1, 2015, John Moravec, a philosopher of education and world traveler, sent out a manifesto about the future of education. It has caught on and spread far more rapidly than he could have imagined it might. Within days, it was read by people in 84 countries and translated into seven languages (with more translations on the way). Read it here and send it on!

Lack of respect for children is revealed in the language used by the Nobel Committee in their award of this year's Peace Prize. It's also revealed in the United Nation's Declaration of the Rights of the Child.

Parent-child play is ruined when either the parent or the child dominates. Fun occurs when there is no domination in either direction. Parent-child play is not as natural, nor as crucial for the child's development, as child-child play, but it can still be fun.

Most of the grown unschoolers in our survey were very happy with their unschooling and said they would unschool their own children. A few, however, were unhappy, and their descriptions of their childhoods make it clear why they would be. This final report in the series describes the advantages and disadvantages of unschooling, in the respondents’ own words.

Our survey of grown unchoolers—who had skipped all or much of K-12—revealed, not surprisingly, that many went on to careers in the creative arts. But that is not all. Many also pursued STEM careers and many become entrepreneurs. They chose careers that are enjoyable, meaningful, and high in occupational self-direction.

About Freedom to Learn

Children come into the world with instinctive drives to educate themselves. These include the drives to play and explore. This blog is primarily about these drives and ways by which we could create learning environments that optimize rather than suppress them.